YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE
FESTIVAL FOCUS Supplement to The Aspen Times
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Monday, July 2, 2012
Vol 23, No. 3
Baroque Evening Features ‘Water Music Suite’ administration and artistic advisor. “Of course, he is a Baroque/Classical speThe Aspen Music Festival and cialist, but I would say, above all, he is a School (AMFS) brings back its popular music specialist.” Baroque evening this year with an extra The special event will also include treat: Handel’s Water Music Suite, a work Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C major as beloved today as the day it premiered and Piano Concerto in D minor and Vivon July 17, 1717, when Britain’s King aldi’s Concerto for Two Cellos in G minor, George I commanded that it be repeated Bassoon Concerto in A minor, and Conthree times. The program will be led and certo for Two Violins in D major. performed by harpsichordist, conductor, Santourian says one of McGegan’s and period perforgreatest gifts is his mance expert Nichability to communiolas McGegan at cate with perform8:30 pm on Thursers and instruct day, July 5, in Harris them in the adapConcert Hall. tation of articulaMcGegan agrees tion, vibrato, and with the king, in bowing to mimic that no matter how the instruments of many times he the Baroque Era plays it, Water Music (1600–1750). is always fresh. At that time, “the “Personally, I Asadour Santourian wind instruments AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration never get tired of had much fewer and Artistic Advisor playing good mukeys, and the horns sic over and over and trumpet had again—there are always new things to no valves,” McGegan says. String instrudiscover,” he says. “It is easy to enjoy in ments had a lighter, softer, more delicate the first hearing, but it is of such quality sound. that it will repay repeated hearings, too.” But McGegan helps performers find McGegan exudes a joyful effervescence that sound, and in a limited number of that inspires both the audience and the rehearsals. musicians he conducts. “He is able to translate and transfer “Nicholas has an absolutely infectious his knowledge of Baroque performance ALEX IRVIN / AMFS love of music that he is able to transmit practice to modern instruments and Nicholas McGegan conducting AMFS students in the to other people,” says Asadour SantouFestival’s 2011 Baroque Evening. McGegan is a renowned harpsichordist, conductor, and Baroque period expert. rian, AMFS vice president for artistic See BAROQUE, Festival Focus page 3 GRACE LYDEN
Festival Focus writer
Nicholas has an absolutely infectious love of music that he is able to transmit to other people.
Chris Botti Crosses Genres, ‘Loves to Play’ as “Chris Botti in Boston” and “Italia,” but also new material from his latest studio album: “Impressions.” Chris Botti’s albums have sold more than three mil- He is particularly proud of the most recent release, lion copies, but the jazz trumpeter still says the greatest which explores thirteen different impressions of a rewards of playing are the energy and excitement of live ballad and features guest artists such as Herbie Hanperformance. cock and Vince Gill. “There is nothing more satisfying “I think that the overall texthan playing a live show,” Botti says. ture and feel of the album is “When you record an album, it can something I’ve always tried to take a long time to know if people do,” Botti says. “We wanted to like it, but when you perform live, take the listener on a journey it’s immediate. When the audience but also keep them in that walks out of that theater, and they same mode or mood, and I feel that they’ve been moved emothink we were successful at tionally, that’s the greatest thing in doing that.” music.” The Festival and JAS work The five-time Grammy-nomitogether regularly, but the colChris Botti nated artist will perform at 8:30 laboration has special meanpm Saturday, July 7, in the Beneing during an AMFS season dict Music Tent. The concert is presented by the that is inspired by the theme, “Made in America.” Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) and Jazz As“There is no looking at American music without jazz,” PHOTO COURTESY OF CHRIS BOTTI pen Snowmass (JAS). Cross-genre artist and phenomenal trumpeter Chris Botti will take the Benedict Music Tent stage at 8:30 pm on Saturday, July 7. Botti plans to play selections from hit records such See BOTTI Festival Focus page 3 GRACE LYDEN
Festival Focus writer
When the audience walks out... and they feel that they’ve been moved emotionally, that’s the greatest thing in music.
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Page 2 | Monday, July 2, 2012
FESTIVAL FOCUS: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide
Supplement to The Aspen Times
Music Festival Competition Winner Performs July 11 than music, though music was a substantial part,” Yu says. “I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to do.” Though Yu now wants to pursue solo violin Mason Yu, now twenty-one years old, was in second grade and taking a piano technique exam when he first performance, he was not always so sure. His friends heard another student play the violin. He fell in love and family in Irvine, California, assumed he would go with the sound. He went to his parents that day to ask into music, but Yu also applied to regular universities. He decided on the Cleveland Institute of Music in part for violin lessons. “I rarely spoke up in terms of what I wanted to do, and because he worried that music is difficult to go back to that was one of the things I spoke up about,” says Yu, if not pursued from a young age. Since going to Cleveland, Yu has taken advantage of whose parents agreed to adding a second instrument. Yu comes to Aspen this summer as a fellowship the conservatory’s partner school, Case Western Reserve student of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS). University, taking classes in topics such as computer programming. But recently, he has The colors of his playing will ring become more and more certain his throughout the Benedict Music future lies with the violin. Tent at 6 pm on Wednesday, July “The past year has been a 11, when he performs Hindemith’s crossroads in how I think about Violin Concerto with the Aspen music,” Yu says. Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted In April, his quartet went to New by Jane Glover. York on a self-arranged trip to study The appearance as a soloist is with Mark Steinberg, first violinist in a result of being selected as the the Brentano String Quartet, for two AMFS’s Dorothy DeLay Fellow. This Mason Yu days. Steinberg devoted four hours is Yu’s seventh summer coming to AMFS 2012 DeLay Fellow a day to Yu’s chamber group, called the Festival. the Omer Quartet, and Yu says they Yu still plays piano, and it is one of his two minors at the Cleveland Institute of Music. were “blown away” by his intellect, his philosophy of He studies violin there with Paul Kantor, also an AMFS giving freedom to music, and a general focus on “what artist-faculty member, and he will be a senior in the fall. the music is really about.” “Something opened up,” Yu says. “I had always been But Yu’s interests are not limited to music. He is also minoring in economics. When he was in high school, Yu serious, but I wasn’t sure in my inner self if I really liked wrote and designed for the newspaper, and he enjoyed what I was doing or not. Some people know they clearly love music and they really want to do it, but [before the physics. “Academics were a bigger part of the time that I spent quartet trip this year] that wasn’t me, yet.” GRACE LYDEN
Festival Focus writer
The thing about music that attracts me is the neverending search.
Mason Yu PHOTO BY LYDIA YU
Steinberg inspired Yu to delve deeper into the Hindemith concerto, a rarely performed work that Yu first heard of in a twentieth-century music history course and asked to play. The piece was last performed at the Festival in 1985, and Yu is glad to be bringing it back to the stage in Aspen. “Hindemith’s music can sometimes be severe, and people might approach it severely and objectively, but See YU Festival Focus page 3
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FESTIVAL FOCUS: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide
Baroque: Audience Also Learns Continued from Festival Focus page 1
modern instrumentalists in very quick and succinct ways,” Santourian says. Alan Fletcher, president and CEO of the Festival, says this understanding of Baroque style and performance practice is essential training for a classical musician. “These days just about every classical orchestral performer needs to understand the aesthetic of Baroque and how it’s different,” Fletcher says. “Tonal production is different. Balance is different. Experts like Nic McGegan really accomplish a lot of teaching, both for the people who are taking part—typically a mixture of students and faculty—but also just for everybody who goes.” Audiences who have been to events featuring McGegan at the Festival before will recall that he provides commentary while the stage crew shifts instruments between pieces. “It’s better than any program note we can offer because it comes from his experience,” Santourian says. “He’s full of anecdotes and is extraordinarily
engaging.” The performing ensemble will also include Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan, who was featured last week in A Gershwin Celebration, the opening concert of the Festival’s season. Barnatan will perform Bach’s Piano Concerto in D minor. “I’m having a little bit of a Bach fest this summer,” says Barnatan, who is also performing Bach concerti in Vail and Santa Fe. “I am immersing myself in this world. This is great music. It’s Bach; it’s the father of music as we know it.” Hundreds of years after their composition, Bach’s works still appeal to performers and audiences alike, which Barnatan sees as a tribute to the music’s complexity and true beauty. “It’s amazing to me that they’re still so compelling, these pieces,” Barnatan says. “A lot of these concertos were written and rewritten for different instruments and put into cantatas and all sorts of other pieces and yet, the music manages to work so beautifully in any form it takes.”
Monday, July 2, 2012 | Page 3
Buy One, Get One Free! Buy one ticket, get one free to the season’s first performance of the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra at 6 pm, Thursday, July 5, in the Benedict Music Tent. Mei-Ann Chen leads a concert featuring Brahms’s Symphony No. 2, and AMFS artist-faculty member Anton Nel plays MacDowell’s romantic Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor. Present for One-time use. No cash value.
Aspen Music Festival and School Box Office Hours Harris Concert Hall: 9 am through the intermission of the evening concert, daily. Wheeler Opera House: 9 am–5 pm daily.
Botti: Jazz at the Festival Continued from Festival Focus page 1
PHOTO COURTESY OF VLADIMIR FELTSMAN
Feltsman to Play ‘Emperor’ Concerto GRACE LYDEN
Festival Focus writer
Vladimir Feltsman is returning to Aspen, which he calls his “home away from home,” at 6 pm Friday, July 6, to play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” with the Aspen Chamber Symphony. The concert will be conducted by Jane Glover in the Benedict Music Tent. The “Emperor” concerto was the last piano concerto Beethoven wrote, and Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor, calls it the biggest work the composer ever wrote for the instrument. “It is the fully fledged peak of his powers as a composer,” Santourian says. “It is the showcase of all showcases for the pianist, and yet, with all of Beethoven’s music, you have to be idiomatically and expressively correct. The ‘Emperor’ demands more sound, more power, more of everything, and yet you can’t cross the border of the Classical Era into the Romantic Era.” Both Santourian and Alan Fletcher, president and CEO of the presenting organization, the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS), are looking forward to hearing Feltsman play it. “He is a complete artist; he can do anything,” Fletcher says. “‘Emperor’ is one of those pieces with out-sized personality, and that is good for Feltsman.” He notes the piece is grandiose from the start. “Here is a piece where I think you can clap after the first movement,” Fletcher says, half in jest. But while some performers take the piece’s nickname to be referring to them, Feltsman hopes the audience will be listening to Beethoven, not Feltsman. “There are two types of musicians, two types of artists,”
Feltsman says. “The first type basically play themselves. They come, they show what they think about this music, what they can do, their technique, their flamboyancy. The second type of artist is a tool through which music speaks. I flatter myself with the idea that I belong to the second type.” Santourian has always been impressed by Feltsman’s artistry, finding that even when Feltsman plays standard repertoire, he brings something new to the work. “He will bring a musician’s thoughtfulness, as he always does, a certain amount of elegance, a nuance that is individual to him, and despite the fact that we may all know all the notes, there will be surprising areas and dark corners of the piece that Feltsman will illuminate for us,” Santourian says. Feltsman is also performing at an intimate benefit dinner at the home of an AMFS trustee on July 5. Tickets and additional information about this private event are available at the AMFS Box Office. Feltsman performed a Mozart concerto with Glover a few years ago and says he looks forward to sharing the stage with her again. Glover came to the Festival in 2007 to conduct the U.S. premiere of Eliogabalo, a recently recovered Baroque opera by Cavalli, and she has been coming ever since. This season, she is conducting two orchestral concerts. “In both programs, she’s giving us the kinds of programs she excels in,” Santourian says. The July 6 program also includes two Mozart symphonies and Benjamin Britten’s A Time There Was... op. 90, an orchestration of English folk tunes that takes its title from the opening line of Thomas Hardy’s nostalgic poem, “Before Life and After.”
says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher. But Botti takes inspiration from other genres, as well: Leonardo Amuedo, the Brazilian guitarist from “Impressions,” will appear with Botti at the Tent on July 7, along with Grammy-winning vocalist Lisa Fischer, who toured with the Rolling Stones for fifteen years. The first track on “Impressions” is Botti’s interpretation of Chopin’s Prelude No. 20 in C minor, and Botti says his classical training “absolutely” helped his current musical pursuits. “My practice regimen is the same as it has been for the past twenty-five years,” Botti says. “I do the same routine that I learned from my trumpet teacher, William Adam, whom I studied with in college. It’s very disciplined with long tones, arpeggios, chromatic scales, and classical exercises.” Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor, says that Botti’s love of all music is at the heart of his popularity with such a range of audiences. “He loves to play music on his instrument, and through his instrument, he loves to communicate with people,” Santourian says. “That is ultimately the key, isn’t it—the ability of an artist to communicate with his audience through performance.”
Yu: Searching for Answers Continued from Festival Focus page 2
this concerto is expressive,” he says. Yu has been reading Hindemith’s book, The Craft of Musical Composition, and studying the composer’s background. Hindemith was exiled from Germany for not being a Nazi and wrote the concerto in Switzerland, which is perhaps why one can hear both nostalgia and hints of sadness in the work, Yu says. Though Hindemith is the first composer whom Yu has studied this avidly, he will not be the last. “The thing about music that attracts me is the never-ending search,” Yu says. “You can’t ever get too deep in it. You can’t ever answer the question of each piece. There is no correct answer, but you still try to find it, and it’s the ultimate challenge.”